Peter Blum is pleased to announce BET WEEN, the third solo exhibition of Esther Kläs at Peter Blum Gallery on view at 20 West 57th Street, New York. There will be an opening reception on Friday October 28, from 6 to 8 p.m. The exhibition runs through December 10.

BET WEEN is a selection from a 12-piece series, made in Buenos Aires in 2013, of large-scale monotype, print, and colored pencil works on paper. The drawings were made with sculptures in mind—not as sketches for future sculptures, but with thoughts of what space sculptures occupy, and what sort of movement they might provoke. They are about proximity between entities, and existences making new existences possible, to be made redundant thereafter.

The titles of these works both reference where they were made and categorize them using colors, letters, and concepts that exist within the works themselves. These linguistic hints, coupled with the physicality of the material application emphasize Kläs’s highly personal visual language. As in her sculptural work, both the hand and the limitations of the body are employed to measure and move through space—in this case the expansive white field of the paper.

A publication, with these works and a story by Gary Indiana, will be released for the occasion.

New York City, NY — Bernarducci.Meisel.Gallery is pleased to the announce Photorealist Urban Landscapes, the first exhibition to present a historical overview of cityscape paintings by the following artists; Robert Bechtle, Anthony Brunelli, Robert Cottingham, Don Eddy, Richard Estes, Max Ferguson, Robert Gniewek, Gus Heinze, Don Jacot, Charles Jarboe, Cheryl Kelley, Ron Kleemann, Neil MacCormick, Jack Mendenhall, Bertrand Meniel, Robert Neffson, Adam Normandin, John Salt, Raphaella Spence, and Nathan Walsh. This historical survey of the Photorealist urban landscape aims to access and reevaluate the method in which the cityscape has traditionally been painted. The earliest painting in this exhibition is by Ron Kleemann and the most recent painting is by Raphaella Spence.

Spence’s Roma di Sera (2016), depicts the historical city skyline over a bridge on the Tiber river in Rome. The city’s history is mirrored in its architecture that it is meticulously painted in the background and reflected in the river. In contrast, an earlier painting of the Old Police Headquarters (1984) by Richard Estes captures a quintessential cityscape scene. It is the former headquarters of the New York City Police Department. Estes paved the way for artists working today by narrowing his streets to follow the multiple point perspective of his compositions depicted in this painting.

Kleemann’s Manhattan on the Hudson (1979) is a painting of a yellow helicopter and a yellow maintenance truck at the Heliport in midtown Manhattan on the Hudson River. There is a gray chain link fence serving as a barrier between the viewer and the Heliport. The license plate of the maintenance truck reads NY indicating that the rarely depicted setting is New York City. The only skyscrapers in Weehawken, New Jersey and are visible in the far distance.

Approximately two dozen paintings are included in this exhibition. Many of the artists exhibited here are also on view in the traveling museum exhibition 50 Years of Hyperrealism that is currently on view at the Osthaus Museum in Hagen Germany through January 2017. The exhibition has traveled to notable institutions such as the Museo Thyssen Bornemisza in Spain, the Museum of Fine Arts in Bilbao, The Birmingham Gallery of Art and more.

For further information and images of works from the exhibition please contact Marina Press at (212) 593-3757 or marina@meiselgallery.com.

Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.
— John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917–1963)

To use this famous quote as the opening of this curatorial essay is not an attempt to instigate nationalist ideological debates over political governance. On the contrary, it is to reveal how, in his critique of John F. Kennedy, American neoclassical economist Milton Friedman (1912–2006) with his idea of the “free man” and absolute freedom that it entails, defied democratic functioning in the name of economic freedom; how biopolitics verged on absolute control; how the neoliberal definition of “freedom” is distorted, to satisfy the desire for economic expansion, by political parties and corporate conglomerates into a weapon to disintegrate a nation and its democratic mechanisms, in turn constraining, trampling, and annihilating human freedom.

A seemingly ironic slogan, “For a better tomorrow” is intended to underline the status quo where we are faced with a structural problem haunted by neoliberalism. The intervention of art turns out to be a catalyst, accentuating the previously neglected issues and phenomena in public discussion, and allowing the oversimplified and consumerized subject to manifest its paradoxical nature and complexity. We must be aware how the global public domain is silenced in media manipulation by multinational corporations, where the ability to initiate public discourse and to form a consensus is debilitated. But at the same time, the repression of reality is breeding a greater force of resistance in contemporary art. Via the reality portrayed through this exhibition, it is hoped that the artistic domain becomes part of the public domain, focusing attention on the political-economic structure, ideological paradigm shifts, and the state of man, all highlighted in diverse art forms. For this is not only a manifestation of democratic ideals, but also an emancipation of the artistic domain, furthering art’s role in knowledge production on global and local levels.

This exhibition will explore why murder is so often a source of fascination—frequently inflected by irony and wry humor—in the visual arts today. Why are we fascinated with murder? Our bookstores, TV screens, movie houses, live theaters, and digital entertainment services all attest abundantly every day to a ubiquitous, unflagging interest in stories of violent death and its detection. Visual art, as the works assembled in “Murder, She Said” suggest, is also rife with both explicit depictions and oblique evocations of human slaughter. Moreover, the obsession prevails at every level of culture, from Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (a masterful first-person tale of an axe murder) to Jim Thompson’s starkly titled The Killer Inside Me, from Jacques-Louis David’s elegant Death of Marat to Adam’s lurid crime-scene photographs.

The appeal of murder itself, as reflected in art and literature, is in some ways easy to understand. Artworks can provide us the vicarious satisfaction of dispatching our enemies—and thus of controlling death, the very eventuality that, in real life, implacably haunts, defies, and defeats us. Every child playing Cops and Robbers feels that joy, though half a lifetime may pass before the same person, grown up, grasps its true source and philosophic import.

More difficult to fathom is why the investigation of murder so irresistibly absorbs us. In book after book, picture after picture, movie after movie, we find ourselves compelled to find out who did the foul deed. Once the instincts of the hunt are aroused, we are subtly drawn into a step-by-step inquiry, whether conducted by King Oedipus tragically determined to learn who killed his father or by a slouching, rumpled Columbo turning at the door to ask one last insidious question.

Joan Giordano’s work crosses the boundaries of painting and collage to become complex layers of dimensional sculptural assemblage. Giordano folds and shapes newspapers and hand-made papers into forms that undulate rhythmically while making great impact in their statements. Cyriaco Lopes’ intermedia art series Queer Saints and Martyrs depicts saints undergoing ecstatic moments of doom but also apotheosis in what he calls “queering art history”. that melds past art traditions with the erotic body. D. Dominick Lombardi’s Urchins relate to the recent Drug Wars murders in Mexico and are humorous sculptural comments on death, and killing. Along with his paintings of martyred saints, and due to their critical nature, they may appear sacrilegious for they are like a slap in the face of conventional representations. Mimmo Catania’s Women Watching TV, 2008 in its grisaille painting style mimics a tv scenario in which two women watch a bloody murder scene from the comfort of their couch. The blood is the only color on the canvas thus can be read as real action. Catania’s scene is contradictory in that the make believe nature of black and white belies the real life drama of bloody patch on the head of the murdered victim against the scene of the relaxing women. Despo Magoni’s paintings A Marked Man, No Tresspasing and Murder by Numbers play on the concept of the human condition with powerful strokes of complementary reds and greens. Magoni paints men getting stabbed, alone or watched by an antagonist. Magoni’s images become more conceptual by the addition of text that references flatness and maintains our gaze on the surface of the two-dimensional canvas. Fay Ku’s Throne like much of her other work on paper, exposes the inequities imposed on women, by recruiting Chinese legends and myths. Her characters are based on multi-layered psychological narratives executed in a figurative mode, in graphite, ink and watercolor. Mary Ting’s installation work Our Lady Macbeth Gloves: No Ocean Can Cleanse Our Hands comprises a set of gloves that have been roughly sewn to allude to trauma stitching. So that, the idea of protection is controverted by the looseness created of the open stitching, and the transparency of surgical gloves by the opacity of the bloody drips. This contradictory element is what makes Ting’s images so engaging and multi-dimensional. Jonathan Santlofer’s ink wash on paper series The Dark End of the Street, which was originally created to illustrate an anthology of crime stories, is especially suited to the theme of this show. His ink wash paintings allude to black and white photography and pre-color television in their shadowy, mysterious colorless nature. Mac Adams series Vanitas, in black and white are also suggestive of violence. In his black and white photographic series, Adams depicts a broken white pearl necklace near a gaping black hole in a decaying floor. While danger is suggested by both the broken pearls and aperture, the subject also works as Vanitas or as reminder of the emptiness of material life. Angela Strassheim’s archival print photographs in this show Underwear Shoved Down Esophagus and Drug Deal Gone Bad are some of her more explicit images. While they reveal her training in biomedical and forensic photography in their subject and detail, they are artworks that probe beyond the surface to the inner depths of human psychology whether seen in family, religious or domestic scenes. Corinne Botz’s photographs Burned Cabin (from afar) and Log Cabin from her Nutshell Studies in Unexplained Death series of photographs were inspired by Frances Glessner Lee’s models of actual crime scene models build in the 1940s and 50s. In her photographs Botz focuses on conveying the traces of life’s traumas right before the final momentthe dust, grime, and even decadence. Yolanda Andrade’s color photographs Ex Votos and Roses and El Vestido Azul, of 2011 depict presence through absence. They capture moments of death as much as the daily life and rituals of Mexican people dealing with Aztec folk legends, history and myth. She comments on a way of life that includes the sadness involved in losing a child both as parent and as society.

In many respects, all these artists find themselves operating in the investigative mode associated with murder-mysteries. Ultimately, they ask not simply why one particular person dies but why anyone dies. The recognition of the core absurdity of death puts these present-day visual artists in the company of existential philosophers as well as the masters of World War II-era noir fiction and film.

About John Jay College of Criminal Justice: An international leader in educating for justice, John Jay College of Criminal Justice of The City University of New York offers a rich liberal arts and professional studies curriculum to upwards of 15,000 undergraduate and graduate students from more than 135 nations. In teaching, scholarship and research, the College approaches justice as an applied art and science in service to society and as an ongoing conversation about fundamental human desires for fairness, equality and the rule of law.
For more information, visit www.jjay.cuny.edu.

“Within an environment envisioned by the artist upon seeing the gallery allotted to him, he arranges work stemming from his early youth to the very present, in a manner of a child being handed toys, new and old: some are cherished and idolized, some are semi-precious in rank, some are abandoned and neglected in slumber of increasing hate generating towards them. Some are loved to the utmost, so much he’d want to hold onto them until the very last moment before death, and beyond.

“The work being treated as such will be comprised of fragments of former larger scale environments, drawings, paintings, objects found and fabricated. In ‘and then leave me to the common swifts’, nothing is an attempt of recreating the original composition of when these works were displayed each for its first time. Instead the artist gives in to whatever his innate forces originating in his emotions command him to do upon the encounter with this work, his very own, for the most part. The result is further also constrained by time or its lack, and the pressure created by complex sociological processes, which sometimes leads the artist to surrender to a fatalism otherwise strongly fought.”

Generous funding for the exhibition is provided by the Ringier Collection, The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art, and MoMA’s Wallis Annenberg Fund for Innovation in Contemporary Art through the Annenberg Foundation.

Special thanks to Craig Robins and Jackie Soffer and to Erik Bruce Fabrik.

For over 60 million persons in the world today, shelter is defined through constant movement or escape. Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter explores the ways in which contemporary architecture and design have addressed notions of shelter in light of global refugee emergencies. From the strengthening of international borders to the logistics of mobile housing systems, how we understand shelter is ultimately defined through an engagement with security. Refugee camps, once considered temporary settlements, have become sites through which to examine how human rights intersect with the making of cities. Bringing together projects by architects, designers, and artists, working in a range of mediums and scales, that respond to the complex circumstances brought about by forced displacement, the exhibition focuses on conditions that disrupt conventional images of the built environment.

Peter Blum is pleased to announce Coal Seam redux, the first solo exhibition of Miles Coolidge at Peter Blum Gallery, on view at 20 West 57th Street, New York. There will be an opening reception on Friday December 16, from 6 to 8 p.m. The exhibition runs through February 4, 2017.

Coal Seam redux consists of two recent bodies of photographic works that are concerned with how scientific and industrial processes seep into the realm of art.

The main gallery space will display five large-scale black-and-white photographs of the active working surface of a coal mine in the Ruhr Valley, Germany. This series, titled Coal Seam, Bergwerk Prosper-Haniel, was shot in 2013 with an 8 x 10 camera using long exposures that capture the terrain in the darkness of the mine shaft. These images are like a window into a dense field of pitch-black combustible matter, compressed over millions of years. The prints, which each measure 57 x 50 inches (145 x 127 cm), show a deep crack that splits the image in two parts. This division of the pictorial field recalls the formal concerns of minimalism as well as monochromatic painting.

The second group of works on view titled Chemical Pictures, consists of a group of color images that are inspired by the paper chromatographic experiments of the mid-nineteenth century German scientist, F.F. Runge. Coolidge follows Runge’s original instructions for combining various chemicals on the surface of paper to create saturated rings of color that are simultaneously controlled procedures and unique enigmatic images. These images call to mind tantric drawings, halos, and eyes. The titles for these works are derived from the instructions for each chemical combination.

Coal Seam redux addresses scientific, social and artistic history with a rich visual vocabulary. Coal is essential to these bodies of work both as a subject and as the material used to create the pigments on the photographs themselves. This conflation of subject and object is the crux of Coolidge’s nuanced investigations.

Miles Coolidge (b. 1963, Montreal) received his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Recent exhibitions include Chemical Pictures, ACME, Los Angeles, 2016; Photographs and Chemical Pictures, Franz Josef Albers Museum Quadrat, Bochum, Germany, 2016; Reconstructions: Recent Photographs and Video from the Met Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2015; Road Trip: Photography of the American West from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Musée des Beaux-Artes de Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France, 2014; American Scene Photography, NSU Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, 2014. His work is included in many museum collections including the Albright-Knox Gallery, Baltimore Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Orange County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, among others.

Lovers is an immersive, room-sized multimedia installation by Japanese artist Teiji Furuhashi (1960–1995). Life-sized images of the artist and other fellow members of the Kyoto-based artist collective Dumb Type are projected onto the walls of a darkened room from a tower of computer-controlled video and slide projectors at its center. The figures move like specters around the perimeter of the space, in a looped choreographic sequence made variable by a visitor-activated motion sensor, which intervenes to restart one of the projections when triggered. Confined to their autonomous projections, these eponymous “lovers” overlap at moments within the sequence, whether running past each other or pausing in a gesture of embrace, yet their bodies never make contact. Made just one year before Furuhashi’s death from AIDS-related illness, Lovers speaks to what the artist has described as “the theme of contemporary love in an ultra-romantic way.” Presented for the first time since its inaugural exhibition at MoMA in 1995, the installation showcases the results of an extensive conservation effort recently completed by the Museum’s media conservators.

Circa 1970 presents paintings, drawings, prints, photographs and sculpture from the Studio Museum’s collection. The featured works, all made between 1970 and 1979, reflect the historical, socio-political and cultural landscapes of the decade. Recent, key gifts to the Studio Museum’s permanent collection of artworks by McArthur Binion, Robert Blackburn and David Hammons conceptually and formally drive the exhibition’s examination into this rich decade.

Since its founding in 1968, the Studio Museum has exhibited work by black artists committed to bearing witness to acts of protest. Now, in an exhibition that takes its name from one of Pope.L’s “Skin Set” drawings, Black People Are the Window and the Breaking of the Window (2004), the Studio Museum provides a focused look at current and historical expressions of protest through works of art primarily drawn from the Museum’s collection. The Window and the Breaking of the Window includes work by Devin Allen, Alice Attie, Deborah Grant, Steffani Jemison, Kerry James Marshall and more.

The Window and the Breaking of the Window is organized by Amanda Hunt, Associate Curator.

Mention the word “cowboy,” and the image that most often comes to mind—from American paintings, vintage films and television shows—is a lone ranger astride a noble white horse overlooking the plains of the Wild West. The exhibition Black Cowboy is a contribution toward overcoming the historical omission of African-American communities with long histories of keeping and training horses, and toward demonstrating that their tradition is alive and well today. Visitors to the exhibition will find cowboys in unexpected locations—riding down a busy city avenue, for example—or in complex situations, such as a rodeo held within the confines of a state prison. The images will show that African-American children and women, too, can take on the aura of this figure, who symbolizes our country’s independence and stoic pride. Black Cowboy expands our idea of what constitutes an American icon and legacy, and complicates a narrative that has been tightly woven into our popular culture.

The Christa Project: Manifesting Divine Bodies
Featuring the gift of the original 1974 sculpture by Edwina Sandys
The Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York
October 6, 2016 – March 12, 2017
The 1975 sculpture Christa by Edwina Sandys, a 4 x 5 foot statue cast in bronze consisting of a nude female Christ on an acrylic cross, will be on view above the altar in the Chapel of Saint Saviour beginning on October 6th at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City.
Coinciding with the installation of Christa, The Very Reverend Dr. James A. Kowalski, Dean of the Cathedral, announced an exhibition of contemporary art exploring the language, symbolism, art, and ritual associated with the historic concept of the Christ image and the divine as manifested in every person, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.
The exhibition will feature works by Meredith Bergmann, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Holly Trostle Brigham, Loren Eiferman, Nona Faustine, Jackie Fawn, Terry Flaxton, Fredericka Foster, William Johnston, Gabriel García Román, Janice Gordon, Hélène Gugenheim, Jenny Hankwitz, Emma Lindström, Heidi Loening, Ted Meyer, Eiko Otake, Edwina Sandys, Kiki Smith, Esmay Wagemans, Kara Walker and Bettina WitteVeen and selections from the Cathedral collection. The exhibition will also feature pieces from the James Parks Morton Interfaith Art Collection.

Acclaimed performance artist Eiko Otake has been appointed Artist-in-Residence and project co-curator. She will offer solo performances within the Cathedral and design a mutable exhibition of dance photographs created in collaboration with historian-photographer William Johnston, all of which explore the dignity and transcendence inherent in the ordinary and the disregarded. Hannah Wolfe Eisner, a student at Wesleyan University who joined the Cathedral as an intern in 2015 and devoted her intellect, time and passion to the exhibition, is the in-house co-curator.

BACKGROUND
Christa was originally created for the United Nations’ International Decade for Women and debuted in London in 1975. It has since been displayed in galleries, museums and churches throughout the world. Christa hung briefly in the Cathedral’s ambulatory in 1984, causing enormous controversy (see below and attached). Conversations about the politics of identity have changed tremendously since the 1980s. Christa’s essential statement, however, remains vital to our world today: people are hungry to see themselves and each other fully represented in society, especially in its most powerful and iconic institutions.
History: The Christa Event (1984)
During Holy Week of 1984, Christa was displayed in the Cathedral as part of a small exhibition on the feminine divine. The general reception was positive, but a particularly vocal minority condemned the piece and its placement in a house of worship through ecclesiastical denunciations and a plethora of hate mail that attacked the “blasphemy” of changing the symbol of Christ. These dissenters highlighted how the sculpture’s allegedly sexualized (i.e. female) figure brought attention to Christ’s human body, which was “blasphemous, shocking, and inappropriate.”
The Right Reverend Walter Dennis, then Suffragan Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New York, decried Christa as “theologically and historically indefensible!” and called for Christians similarly shocked to write to the Dean of the Cathedral and the Bishop of the Diocese. Other dissenters raised concerns in hundreds of letters preserved in the Cathedral’s archives. Many of their complaints reflected pervasive anxieties about protecting accepted truths from challenges to the status quo.
Other clergy and laypeople defended the work, arguing that Christ as God in human form represents all people: Christ can be depicted in varying ways to help people apprehend the divine by seeing themselves reflected in Christ’s humanity. Christ has been portrayed as a member of a variety of races and ethnicities that differ from his original Semitic identity (including the white Christ of European Christianity), so why not imagine Christ with a different gender? Material from the original exhibition quotes Martin Luther King Jr., who argued that “the visual image” is necessary to prove that “we are all equal in the sight of God”; therefore, Christians need to see their material identities represented in the body of Christ as part of “the very humanity assumed” in the Incarnation.

The Christa Project: Themes
Representations of the human body in art, iconography, popular media and advertising guide our understanding of the myriad realities of the human condition, help us reflect on our particular experiences, and invite us into the mystery of other lives. Whether in Christa’s challenge to how we imagine the Incarnation or in Eiko Otake’s embodied response to environmental trauma in her photographic and live performances, the represented body in context invokes the full range of historical and cultural meaning while including the intimate life and unique perspective of every viewer.
• Iconography: Representing the Body Through Traditional Forms
One central element of The Christa Project engages traditional forms of iconography, as developed in Christianity and other world faiths. Despite the 1984 claims that Christa was simply art and not an object of worship, the two categories are deeply interwoven. Beloved author and Cathedral librarian Madeleine L’Engle wrote, “To try to talk about art and about Christianity is for me one and the same thing, and it means attempting to share the meaning of my life, what gives it, for me, its tragedy and its glory.” The symbolism and iconic imagery that figures of religious devotion (martyrs, saints, holy people) accrue through centuries of meaning-making foregrounds the human body in all its complexity, as shorthand for the indwelling divinity and object of adoration in its own right. This process is not limited to Christian objects of worship but arises in a wide array of artworks framed by various religious and secular social justice concerns.
The Christa Project incorporates an array of iconographic artworks, from Gabriel García Román’s Queer Icons that depict contemporary queer people of color as traditional Christian icons, to Jackie Fawn’s use of indigenous symbols and Internet tropes to inspire social action through her digital poster art. Inspired by medieval Christian reliquaries, both Genesis Breyer P-Orridge’s Touching of Hands and Holly Trostle Brigham’s Hildegard’s Box venerate the symbolism of physical body parts themselves and call attention to how we as viewers interact with iconography in religious and artistic spaces. Kiki Smith’s Ice Man draws on iconographic styles from a different standpoint, using the human body as a gateway to explore notions of historiography, permanence and transience.
• Incarnation: The Union of Spirit and Body
Due in part to interpretations of Christianity that emphasized the masculine (white) spirit of God as rightful dominator of the feminized (and racialized) sinful world, the radical message of Incarnation that brought God and world together in the person of Christ has not infrequently been overshadowed by the reification of the status quo. The underlying, radical nature of the Incarnation—the union, in one person, of Heaven and Earth, finite and infinite, the human and the divine—lies in Christ’s seeking out and embracing of the poor, the sick, the lame, the despised and the forgotten. To attend to, and see manifest, the divine within these disempowered identities, is to see the central promise of the Christian message writ large.
A number of the artists in this exhibition call viewers to look more closely at the implications of division between our physical bodies and world: Eiko’s expressive fragility recapitulates the fragility and resilience of the Earth, even in the face of unthinkable destruction; Nona Faustine’s photographs place her body as a landmark and emblem, revealing the gendered and racialized history written into New York City’s geography and its inhabitants’ bodies; and Esmay Wagemans’ latex casts of her torso raise questions about what constitutes nudity and the boundaries between body and object. Janice Gordon takes us further into the body with her A Cuore Aperto (“Open Heart”) triptychs that use the traditional, devotional form to look at the sacred within our organs, flesh, and bloodstreams in light of chronic illness. Expanding the definition of “body” beyond the basic human outline, Emma Lindström’s cosmic paintings herald the stuff of swirling and explosive pre-verbal thought as the locus of creativity.
• Pilgrimage: Bodies in a Landscape
Several artists in The Christa Project perform acts of pilgrimage through the journeys they take to situate their own and other bodies in significant places. In addition to these artistic processes, the visitors make pilgrimages by coming to the Cathedral and transporting themselves to the places each artwork depicts. Pilgrimage is not only the journey; it is the effect of the journey on the pilgrim. In A Body in Fukushima, Eiko traveled to Fukushima following the 2011 nuclear disaster in order to fully grieve and create through the presence of her body in a particular space. Likewise, the development of Bettina Witteveen’s installation emerged from her passionate research into each of her five “Christas,” whose places of life and death she made pilgrimages to and whose memories she physically memorializes through site-specific sculpture. Kara Walker’s A Subtlety: or the Marvelous Sugar Baby drew crowds to the abandoned Domino sugar factory where it was placed, and her video An Audience / Rhapsody shows the ancient-made-contemporary symbol of the monumental sphinxlike sculpture as a destination and catalyst for a sometimes all-too-human multitude.
• Celebration: Doing Homage to the Body
Before its festive definition came into wider usage, “celebration” referred to the rites of the Eucharist—an act both spiritual and deeply physical, with priest and congregation together partaking in remembrance of Christ’s suffering on the Cross as they consume his body and blood as vital sustenance. This ceremony, comprising the heart of Christian worship, speaks of the intimacy between death and life, carnality and beatitude, and the role of the community in building meaning out of legacies of historical violence. The Christa Project invites the viewer to ask questions about the nature of trauma, how we remember violence, and what it means to celebrate our physical, psychological, and cultural scars. The symbol of Christ’s body, mocked, wounded, physically scarred and ultimately crucified, provides a jumping-off point for many of these investigations: what does it mean to “triumph over” insults and brutality against the body? Must scars (whether physical, mental, or spiritual) be seen as something to “overcome,” or can they, and human life in total, be honored and recognized without recapitulating hierarchies of power and pain?
Edwina Sandys’ sculpture Christa adds to these questions through her emphasis on female and otherwise marginalized bodies in contemporary culture. Two series in the exhibition, Ted Meyer’s Scarred for Life and Hélène Gugenheim’s Mes cicatrices, Je suis d’elles, entièrement tissé (“My scars, of them I am fully woven”), celebrate physical scars on individual people, voicing their stories and acknowledging the scars as signifiers rather than imperfections. These various pieces call us to think for ourselves about the marks history leaves on the body, and to pay attention to others’ experiences.

Public Programming
Public programs and interpretive content will complement the exhibition, incorporating customized guided visits. Additional programs will include conversations with artists, theologians, and activists. Shakuhachi flute master, Ralph Samuelson, will present an evening of traditional and contemporary music exploring themes prevalent in the exhibition. The Department of Public Education & Visitor Services will be offering age appropriate programs and workshops to school-aged children.
Generous support for this exhibition was provided by the Henry Luce Foundation.

About the Chapel of Saint Saviour
Completed in 1904 by Heins and LaFarge, The Chapel of Saint Saviour stood, for many years, as the first completed portion of the Cathedral. As the term “Saint Saviour” refers to Jesus Christ, in his role as the Holy Redeemer, savior of all people regardless of their origins or their past sins, the Chapel of Saint Saviour makes a fitting home to Christa as an embodiment of Christ’s all-embracing love. The entrance is flanked by 20 angels carved in 1905 by Gutzon Borglum, later the sculptor of Mount Rushmore.

Borglum believed certain angels—specifically the Angel of the Annunciation and the Angel of the Resurrection—must be female. His artistic vision turned into a controversy when a visiting clergyman, viewing the plaster casts for the figures, complained, “Whoever heard of a woman angel?” There was an uproar in the media, as there would be 80 years later with the exhibition of Christa, but in 1905 people were more amused than scandalized at the ridiculous idea of women as embodiments of the divine. Borglum was gently asked to change the statues. The sculptor unhappily agreed, destroying the plaster casts, though preserving the two faces and the hand to take home with him. “I felt like a murderer,” he told The New York Times.

About the Cathedral
The Cathedral of St. John the Divine is the Cathedral of the Episcopal Diocese of New York. It is chartered as a house of prayer for all people and a unifying center of intellectual light and leadership. For more than a century, it has been deeply involved in education, social justice and active support of the arts and the environment. People from many faiths and communities worship together in services held more than 30 times a week; the soup kitchen serves roughly 25,000 meals annually; and social service outreach has an increasingly varied roster of programs. The distinguished Cathedral School prepares young students to be future leaders, while Adults and Children in Trust, the renowned preschool, afterschool and summer program, offers diverse educational and nurturing experiences. The choral music concerts, Paul Winter’s Solstice concerts and a variety of other musical programming attract large audiences. The American Poets Corner, with a new writer inducted each year, is the only such landmark in the country: a place of pilgrimage and the inspiration for diverse literary programming.

Over the past seven years, the Cathedral has hosted and curated a number of ambitious exhibitions, including The Value of Water; Jane Alexander: Surveys (from the Cape of Good Hope), presented in partnership with the Museum of African Art, and which was listed in the New York Times as one of the ten best exhibitions of the year; Phoenix: Xu Bing at the Cathedral; and The Value of Food: Sustaining a Green Planet, among others.

The Christa Project: Manifesting Divine Bodies is closely tied to the Dignity Initiative, an expression of the Cathedral’s historical principles, launched in 2013 and ongoing. In the midst of many assaults to human wellbeing today, those most at risk are populations whose dignity is under attack – whether from natural events, from exploitation and neglect, or from social systems that promote or sustain inequality and injustice. This exhibition surveys these concepts through the lenses of artists exploring a range of subject matter, including worship, identity, intimate love, community, body image, and our place in the world.

Dignity comprises respect for the human spirit and its universal goals. The Cathedral believes that we can cultivate the capacity, beyond shifting circumstances and in the context of diverse mores, to see that all people deserve attention, respect and care. Moreover, we must identify, celebrate, and support the habits of mind and behavior that lead to strength and perseverance in the face of adversity. In so doing, we become better equipped to respect the dignity of every human being.

Covering the period of artistic innovation between 1912 and 1934, A Revolutionary Impulse: The Rise of the Russian Avant-Garde traces the arc of the pioneering Russian avant-garde from World War I through the 1917 Revolution and the completion of the first Five-Year Plan. Bringing together major works from MoMA’s extraordinary collection, the exhibition features breakthrough experimental projects in painting, drawing, sculpture, prints, book and graphic design, film, photography, and architecture by leading figures such as Alexandra Exter, Natalia Goncharova, El Lissitzky, Kasimir Malevich, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Lyubov Popova, Alexandr Rodchenko, Olga Rozanova, Vladimir and Georgii Stenberg, and Dziga Vertov, among others.

Coinciding with the centennial of the Russian Revolution, this exhibition examines key developments in the conception of Cubo-Futurism, Suprematism, Transrational Language, and Constructivism, as well as avant-garde film and photomontage. The remarkable sense of creative urgency, radical cross-fertilization, and synthesis within the visual arts—as well as aspirations among the Russian avant-garde to affect unprecedented sociopolitical transformation—wielded an influence on modes of art production in the 20th century and changed the course of modern history.

Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction is a comprehensive survey of Picabia’s audacious, irreverent, and profoundly influential work across mediums. This will be the first exhibition in the United States to chart his entire career.

Among the great modern artists of the past century, Francis Picabia (French, 1879–1953) also remains one of the most elusive. He vigorously avoided any singular style, and his work encompassed painting, poetry, publishing, performance and film. Though he is best known as one of the leaders of the Dada movement, his career ranged widely—and wildly—from Impressionism to radical abstraction, from Dadaist provocation to pseudo-classicism, and from photo-based realism to art informel. Picabia’s consistent inconsistencies, his appropriative strategies, and his stylistic eclecticism, along with his skeptical attitude, make him especially relevant for contemporary artists, and his career as a whole challenges familiar narratives of the avant-garde.

Francis Picabia features over 200 works, including some 125 paintings, key works on paper, periodicals and printed matter, illustrated letters, and one film. The exhibition aims to advance the understanding of Picabia’s relentless shape-shifting, and how his persistent questioning of the meaning and purpose of art ensured his iconoclastic legacy’s lasting influence.

Josef Albers (American, born Germany, 1888–1976) is a central figure in 20th-century art, both as a practitioner and as a teacher at the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and Yale University. Best known for his iconic series Homages to the Square, Albers made paintings, drawings, and prints and designed furniture and typography. The least familiar aspect of his extraordinary career is his inventive engagement with photography, which was only discovered after his death. The highlight of this work is undoubtedly the photocollages featuring photographs he made at the Bauhaus between 1928 and 1932. At once expansive and restrained, this remarkable body of work anticipates concerns that Albers would pursue throughout his career: seriality, perception, and the relationship between handcraft and mechanical production.

The first serious exploration of Albers’s photographic practice occurred in a modest exhibition at MoMA in 1988, The Photographs of Josef Albers. In 2015, the Museum acquired 10 photocollages by Albers—adding to the two donated by the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation almost three decades ago—making its collection the most significant anywhere outside the Foundation. This installation celebrates both this landmark acquisition and the publication of One and One Is Four: The Bauhaus Photocollages of Josef Albers, which focuses exclusively on this deeply personal and inventive aspect of Albers’s work and makes many of these photocollages available for the first time.

Since the Department of Architecture and Design was first established in the early 1930s, the Museum's curators, guided by a belief in the power of design to shape everyday experiences and perceptions, have focused on the question “How should we live?” as one of the most vital issues in contemporary design.

How Should We Live? explores the complex collaborations, materials, and processes that have shaped the modernist interior, with a focus on specific environments—domestic interiors, re-created exhibition displays, and retail spaces—from the 1920s to the 1950s. The exhibition brings together over 200 works, drawn from MoMA's Architecture and Design collection as well as the Library, Drawings and Prints, Painting and Sculpture, Film, and Photography. Rather than concentrating on isolated masterworks, attention is given to the synthesis of design elements within each environment, and to the connection of external factors and attitudes—aesthetic, social, technological, and political—that these environments reflect.

The exhibition looks at several designers’ own living spaces, and at frequently neglected areas in the field of design, including textile furnishings, wallpapers, kitchens, temporary exhibitions, and promotional displays. Highlights include recent acquisitions from projects directed by major women architect-designers—Eileen Gray furnishings for the house E-1027 (1929), and Charlotte Perriand’s study bedroom from the Maison du Brésil (1959), for example. Designs from other noted partnerships include Lilly Reich and Mies van der Rohe’s Velvet and Silk Café (1927), Grete Lihotzky’s Frankfurt Kitchen (1926–27), and collaborations between Aino and Alvar Aalto, Ray and Charles Eames, Florence Knoll and Herbert Matter, and Charlotte Perriand, Pierre Jeanneret and Le Corbusier.

The Shape of Things: Photographs from Robert B. Menschel presents an engaging survey of The Museum of Modern Art’s multifaceted collection of photography. Borrowing its title from the eponymous work by Carrie Mae Weems, the exhibition is drawn entirely from works acquired over the past 40 years with the support of Robert B. Menschel, telling the story of photography from its beginnings.

Covering more than 150 years of photography—from an 1843 view of Paris by William Henry Fox Talbot, the English father of photography, to Andreas Gursky’s contemporary monumental landscapes, the exhibition underscores an equal attention to the past and the present, and a strong belief that they complement each other; and that each generation reinvents photography. Since Menschel joined the Committee on Photography at MoMA in 1977, over 500 works have entered the collection through his support, including 162 photographs he recently donated from his personal collection.